Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the...